About SHOP.COM

SHOP.COM is an e-commerce platform for exclusive products with a portfolio containing health and nutrition, beauty products, home and garden, and pet supplies. These products are of a high quality and unique in nature, and thus not easily accessible to consumers in the regular market. Due to the e-commerce nature of the company they have a variety of product offerings starting with differentiating by departments, then categories, subcategories, and so on. Owing to this wide range SHOP.COM needed a custom solution for tracking their customers so as to deliver better customer service.

Transition Strategy

For an e-commerce website it is important to measure how their users interact with the website. Revenue generation from the site, transactions done each day, where do users go from the landing page – all these are extremely necessary for an e-commerce site to know how their user behaviour, and getting to know the website’s weak points wherein they can improve upon to reduce bounce rates, and eventually increase their ROIs. A/B testing is another avenue where e-commerce sites need a whole army of support because this is where they’ll know what is working with their visitors and what isn’t. It is a well known tactic to improve your traffic conversions and thus improve the sales.

SHOP.COM was using a paid analytics tool, Adobe’s SiteCatalyst, which wasn’t sufficing their needs and hence they saw a need to shift. The issues with their existing tool were – exorbitant cost incurred annually for the software, its maintenance, and the training, incomplete reporting as per their requirements, the in-house tools were too complicated, and low trackability of different SEM traffic source performance.

They needed to properly track the large number of pages as per their needs through customizations, tagging, and suitable configuration. It was imperative that the understanding of the site was thorough – the internal site search, category breakdown, and performance of the products. An additional requirement was the crucial A/B testing support for their website.

Doing this for an e-commerce website wasn’t easy due to the amount of data. It is possible to do such transitions only if you have an expert to help you do so. Using the expertise of analytic consultants at Team Blast, they managed to do this transition easily. The way they achieved this transition in a short span of time was done by keeping in mind the following points.

Linking their business needs to the way they measured website traffic.

Having a strong implementation strategy and the support from the organisation to do so.

The need to improve the data reporting efficiency to get the reports which would help in better decision making.

Integration of their various campaigns with Adwords.

Acknowledging and giving extensive time for training of personnels for the new software and how to use it to get the most out of it.

Once the planning stage was over, they started deploying the strategy. Upon working with the SHOP.COM’s team they understood the business goals as well as the intention of analysis. What was clear was that the basic implementation of Google Analytics tool would not be enough owing to the exhaustive product offerings which needed more product pageviews than the basic implementation could allow. Advanced implementation made more sense because that way all their offerings and traffic could be tracked more efficiently. The advanced features of Google Analytics lets you customize tracking objectives, and has on-site search tracking for e-commerce sites. SHOP.COM integrated their multiple accounts on Google Adwords with the Analytics profiles. This helped them to have previously unattainable data on costs and conversions, all in one place. Also, they were getting their previous reporting data structure, and in addition they could now get more custom reports that wasn’t possible before, easing their decision making process drastically.

Results

SHOP.COM can now meet their analysis objectives and access reports with actionable insights that helps them make timely business decisions and improve on-site experiences and conversion ratios through successful implementation of Google Analytics advanced features that has custom tracking features, custom reporting, conversion funnels of user activity, and other analytical features at no cost at all. The shift from a paid tool to a free tool that helped them streamline their business activities saved SHOP.COM thousands of dollars. The analysts also had a more intuitive user interface with easy data view options for various access levels. There was a better access to multiple department information which could help consolidate data and come out with helpful insights. Furthermore, SHOP.COM got a better visibility into many of their SEM traffic sources.

Learnings

Most online businesses today have an analysis tool in place to track user behaviour on their websites. To get such insightful data without paying for the software, but having all the powerful analytical options at your disposal simply cannot be ignored. Even if your website has complexities, Google Analytics experts can customize the tool to get you the data you need to do better in your business.